Shadowrun: Forbidden Arcana (Advanced Magic Rulebook)

Ride the Crashing Wave

Magic is wild. Magic is undisciplined. You can try to impose order and understanding on it, but that’s just surface. Underneath is chaos, an erratic heart beating to a staggering rhythm. You don’t control it, any more than a surfer controls twenty-meter-tall wave; you don’t direct the wave, you ride it, capture a piece of its power, and hope to survive. If you do it right, though, you catch a portion of unimaginable power—power those who control the Sixth World don’t want you to have. All the more reason to push past their boundaries and grab it.

Forbidden Arcana offers dozens of different ways for Awakened characters in Shadowrun to harness that power and make themselves a mana-slinger like no other. From new ways to distinguish spellcasters of different traditions to more chaotic methods for summoning spirits to options for Awakened characters who have mastered their craft, Forbidden Arcana shows players how to break out of conventional molds, use mana in new ways, and become true street legends riding the growing wave of Sixth World mana.

Forbidden Arcana is an advanced magic rulebook for use with Shadowrun, Fifth Edition; magic concepts from the book can be used with Shadowrun: Anarchy, though mechanics for that game are not included.

99% sure it's a secondary supplement after Street Grimoire, and does not replace it.

Mikhail MNovember 28, 2017 4:22 pm UTC

PURCHASER

It does not replace it, it supplements it.

David HMay 12, 2017 2:57 pm UTC

PURCHASER

I think there may be a couple of typos in here. The table on page 47 seems to suggest Mystic Adepts get Astral Perception by default (should be similar to Adepts in that area), and that they cannot Enchant.

There's a lot of good, a fair amount of bad, and a moderate dose of ugly, here. The new options for Awakened characters/NPCs run the gamut from amusing to awesome, with lots of great new Traditions to change up the flavor of Mages/Mystic Adepts, lots [...]

This book will break your game. It's another example of Catalyst shoveling content into a book as quickly as possible to make some money. It's clearly not been playtested, is totally unbalanced and poorly thought through from a mechanics [...]

This is a great book. It might be one of the best SR5 books as of late. The book does have its flaws. There are typos and editing errors, and some of the mechanics are broken as-written. Some of the rules are ambiguos. This is why I rate the [...]

Shadowrun: Forbidden Arcana will be on the list to acquire for anyone GMing a magic heavy Shadowrun campaign, both for useful background information on what is happening with magic and new things to play with. For players, sightly less useful but ther [...]

Interesting! Not the best shadowrun product ever but it certainly has it's charms. Updates and adds a number of new magic rules and variants, such as sub groups and sub paths, details on various traditions of magic with bonuses and penalties. Newly [...]

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